If you're using Chrome on your phone and you suddenly notice that the tab switcher is no longer a scrolling list of cards but a grid, you're not alone. Chrome is testing this new layout — we've received reports of it turning on by default for some users on Dev and Canary. A few seemed to like it, while others weren't all that happy about it. If you're part of the second camp, know that you can easily disable it.

It's no secret that Google may be planning a "Material Design 2" refresh for Chrome, possibly timed to roll out on or near the browser's 10th birthday in September. The new-tab button is one of the more visible elements that's being tinkered with, and now Google is testing a few different positions for that button via a new flag.

A reference to "Material Design 2" was noticed in a Chromium Gerrit commit back in February, which was made private soon after it was pointed out. That commit has since been reopened to the public and has changed references to a Material Design update to mentions of a touch-optimized UI for Chrome. There is, however, a hint that Google plans to roll out a Material Design 2 refresh for Chrome on the browser's 10th birthday in September.

Ever since the first release, Chrome has had a hidden settings page, found at chrome://flags. There, you'll find toggles and switches for hundreds of features in Chrome, ranging from in-progress experiments to completed functionality. But all that time, the page has stayed pretty much the same, progressively becoming harder to use as the number of flags continues to climb.

As you may know, Google often tests new Chrome features in 'flags' - hidden settings that can be enabled or disabled. We first spotted "Chrome Home" in October, which moves Chrome's address bar to the bottom of the screen. This is especially handy for larger screens, but it looks like more changes are coming.

If you haven't yet filled up your New Tab page with icons from frequently visited websites, then Chrome has the perfect flag for you. Digging into the chrome://flags page, you'll find an option under chrome://flags/#enable-ntp-popular-sites that will pre-populate the New Tab page with eight popular websites so it doesn't look as empty.

Here's a cool addition to the latest version of Chrome Dev for Android cool feature of Chrome that can be enabled via a special flag (which Google started turning on for some recently): when you tap on a text field that the browser has saved before in auto-fill, the entry or entries will appear in Android's keyboard auto-complete field instead of the browser itself.

There comes a time in every person's life when he or she needs to access a certain web page and doesn't have an internet connection. Those are troubling times that normally require the individual in question to stay strong and maintain composure until a connection is once again available, but thanks to a new experimental option in the Chrome Dev build for Android, that struggle may be coming to an end.

In the most recent build, there are a couple of new entries in Chrome://flags — Enhanced Bookmarks and Saved Pages — that will allow users to easily save pages for offline viewing, then make them quickly accessible via a new menu option called "Saved Pages" (makes sense, eh?).

Buried in the flags of the latest release of Chrome Dev, v46, is a toggle that allows you to tweak the progress bar animation that you see when loading webpages. The default setting is equivalent to "disabled," but you can try it out and see how it looks.

There are now 4 different options: disabled (which is default), linear, smooth, and fast start. Disabled just leaves things the way they have been for a while. Fast start is like smoother but is set to work faster in the first portion of the page load and slower as it completes.

Smooth, as you might expect, is basically the default animation but at a higher framerate that will look more appealing.

Video quality keeps getting better, which means file sizes keep getting larger, things keep getting more complicated, and software must continue to work harder. According to Googler François Beaufort, the developmental version of Chrome now has a new video renderer that should be able to handle 4K content without stuttering.

You can try things out for yourself by installing Chrome Dev from the Play Store, enabling chrome://flags/#enable-new-video-renderer, and restarting the browser. This should work on your PC and Android devices alike.

Hey look, it now says "Disable." I guess that means it's working.

If your device previously struggled to play 4K60, 4K, or 1080p60 videos on YouTube, try again now.